"This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the
twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between
the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the
storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other. It was a critical
time in the shaping of this nation and the world, equal to the
revolution of 1776 and the perils of the Civil War. Once again the
American people understood the magnitude of the challenge,
the importance of an unparalleled national commitment, and,
most of all, the certainty that only one resolution was acceptable.
The nation turned to its young to carry the heaviest burden, to
fight in enemy territory and to keep the home front secure and productive.
These young men and women were eager for the assignment.
They understood what was required of them, and they
willingly volunteered for their duty.

Many of them had been born just twenty years earlier than I, in
a time of national promise, optimism, and prosperity, when all
things seemed possible as the United States was swiftly taking its
place as the most powerful nation in the world. World War I was
over, America's industrial might was coming of age with the rise of
the auto industry and the nascent communications industry, Wall
Street was booming, and the popular culture was rich with the
likes of Babe Ruth, Eugene O'Neill, D. W. Griffith, and a new author
on the scene, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What those unsuspecting infants
could not have realized, of course, was that these were temporary
conditions, a false spring to a life that would be buffeted by
winds of change dangerous and unpredictable, so fierce that they
threatened not just America but the very future of the planet.

Nonetheless, 1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to
enter the world as an American citizen. The U.S. population had
topped 106 million people, and the landscape was changing rapidly
from agrarian to urban, even though one in three Americans still
lived on a farm. Women were gaining the right to vote with the ratification
of the Nineteenth Amendment, and KDKA in Pittsburgh
was broadcasting the first radio signals across the middle of America.
Prohibition was beginning, but so was the roaring lifestyle that
came with the flouting of Prohibition and the culture that produced
it. In far-off Russia the Bolshevik revolution was a bloody affair,
but its American admirers were unable to stir comparable
passions here.

Five years later this American child born in 1920 still seemed to
be poised for a life of ever greater prosperity, opportunity, and excitement.
President Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge was a benign
presence in the White House, content to let the bankers, industrialists,
and speculators run the country as they saw fit.

As the twenties roared along, the Four Horsemen of Notre
Dame were giving Saturdays new meaning with their college football
heroics. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were raising the
spectacle of heavyweight boxing matches to new heights of frenzy.
Baseball was a daytime game and a true national pastime, from the
fabled Yankee Stadium to the sandlots in rural America.

The New Yorker was launched, and the place of magazines occupied
a higher order. Flappers were dancing the Charleston; Fitzgerald
was publishing The Great Gatsby; the Scopes trial was under
way in Tennessee, with Clarence Darrow and William Jennings
Bryan in a passionate and theatrical debate on evolution versus the
Scriptures. A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, the beginning of a long struggle to force
America to face its shameful policies and practices on race.

By the time this young American who had such a promising start
reached the age of ten, his earlier prospects were shattered; the
fault lines were active everywhere: the stock market was struggling
to recover from the crash of 1929, but the damage was too great.
U.S. income was falling fast. Thirteen hundred banks closed. Businesses
were failing everywhere, sending four and a half million
people onto the streets with no safety net. The average American
farm family had an annual cash income of four hundred dollars.

Herbert Hoover, as president, seemed to be paralyzed in the face
of spreading economic calamity; he was a distant figure of stern
bearing whose reputation as an engineering genius and management
wizard was quickly replaced by cruel caricatures of his aloofness
from the plight of the ever larger population of poor.

Yet Henry Luce managed to launch Fortune, a magazine specializing
in business affairs. United Airlines and American Airlines, still
in their infancy, managed to stay airborne. Lowell Thomas began a
nightly national radio newscast on NBC and CBS. The Lone Ranger
series was heard on radio.

Overseas, three men were plotting to change the world: Adolf
Hitler in Germany, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao Zedong in
China. In American politics, the New York governor, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, was planning his campaign for the 1932 presidential
election.

By 1933, when the baby born in 1920 was entering teenage years,
the promise of that early childhood was shattered by crashing
world economies. American farmers were able to produce only
about sixteen bushels of corn per acre, and the prices were so low
that it was more efficient to feed the corn to the hogs than take it
to market. It was the year my mother moved with her parents and
sister off their South Dakota farm and into a nearby small town,
busted by the markets and the merciless drought. They took one
milk cow, their pride, and their determination to just keep going
somehow.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no
hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office
for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who
earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

My father, an ambitious and skilled construction equipment operator,
raced around the Midwest in his small Ford coupe, working
hellishly long hours on road crews, hoping he could save enough in
the warm weather months to get through another long winter back
home in the small wood-frame hotel his sisters ran for railroad
men, traveling salesmen, and local itinerants in the Great Plains
village founded by his grandfather Richard Brokaw, a Civil War
veteran who came to the Great Plains as a cook for railroad crews.

A mass of homeless and unemployed men drifted across the
American landscape, looking for work or a handout wherever they
could find it. More than thirty million Americans had no income of
any kind. The American military had more horses than tanks, and
its only action had been breaking up a demonstration of World War
I veterans demanding their pension bonuses a year earlier.

Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president of the
United States, promising a New Deal for the beleaguered American
people, declaring to a nation with more than fifteen million
people out of work, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

He pushed through an Emergency Banking Act, a Federal
Emergency Relief Act, a National Industrial Recovery Act, and by
1935 set in motion the legislation that would become the Social Security
system.

Not everyone was happy. Rich Americans led by the Du Ponts,
the founders of General Motors, and big oil millionaires founded
the Liberty League to oppose the New Deal. Privately, in the salons
of the privileged, Roosevelt was branded a traitor to his class.

In Germany, a former painter with a spellbinding oratorical style
took office as chancellor and immediately set out to seize control
of the political machinery of Germany with his National Socialist
German Workers party, known informally as the Nazis. Adolf
Hitler began his long march to infamy. He turned on the Jews,
passing laws that denied them German citizenship, codifying the
anti-Semitism that eventually led to the concentration camps and
the gas chambers, an act of hatred so deeply immoral it will mark
the twentieth century forever.

By the late thirties in America, anti-Semitism was the blatant
message of Father James Coughlin, a messianic Roman Catholic
priest with a vast radio audience. Huey Long, the brilliant Louisiana
populist, came to power, first as governor and then as a U.S.
senator, preaching in his own spellbinding fashion the power of
the little guy against the evils of Wall Street and corporate avarice.

When our young American was reaching eighteen, in 1938, the
flames of war were everywhere in the world: Hitler had seized Austria;
the campaign against Jews had intensified with Kristallnacht,
a vicious and calculated campaign to destroy all Jewish businesses
within the Nazi realm. Japan continued its brutal and genocidal
war against the Chinese; and in Russia, Stalin was presiding over
show trials, deporting thousands to Siberia, and summarily executing
his rivals in the Communist party. The Spanish Civil War
was a losing cause for the loyalists, and a diminutive fascist general,
Francisco Franco, began a reign that would last forty years.

In this riotous year the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain,
believed he had saved his country with a pact negotiated
with Hitler at Munich. He returned to England to declare, "I believe
it is peace for our time ... peace with honor."

It was neither.

At home, Roosevelt was in his second term, trying to balance the
continuing need for extraordinary efforts to revive the economy
with what he knew was the great peril abroad. Congress passed the
Fair Labor Standards Act, setting a limit on hours worked and a
minimum wage. The federal government began a system of parity
payments to farmers and subsidized foreign wheat sales.

In the fall of 1938, Dwight David Eisenhower, a career soldier
who had grown up on a small farm outside of Abilene, Kansas, was
a forty-eight-year-old colonel in the U.S. Army. He had an infectious
grin and a fine reputation as a military planner, but he had no
major combat command experience. The winds of war were about
to carry him to the highest peaks of military glory and political reward.
Ike, as he was called, would become a folksy avatar of his
time.

At the beginning of a new decade, 1940, just twenty years after
our young American entered a world of such great promise and
prosperity, it was clear to all but a few delusional isolationists that
war would define this generation's coming of age.

France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark,
Norway, and Romania had all fallen to Nazi aggression. German
troops controlled Paris. In the east, Stalin was rapidly building up
one of the greatest ground armies ever to defend Russia and communism.

Japan signed a ten-year military pact with Germany and Italy,
forming an Axis they expected would rule the world before the
decade was finished.

Roosevelt, elected to his third term, again by a landslide, was
preparing the United States, pushing through the Export Control
Act to stop the shipment of war materials overseas. Contracts were
arranged for a new military vehicle called the jeep. A fighter plane
was developed. It would be designated the P-51 Mustang. Almost
20 percent of the budget FDR submitted to Congress was for defense
needs. The first peacetime military draft in U.S. history was
activated.

Roosevelt stayed in close touch with his friend, the new prime
minister of England, Winston Churchill, who told the English: "I
have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." And "We
shall not flag or fail ... we shall fight on the seas and oceans ... we
shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and
on the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender."

Our twenty-year-old American learned something of war by
reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, and something
else about the human spirit by watching The Grapes of
Wrath, the film based on John Steinbeck's novel, directed by John
Ford and starring Henry Fonda.

The majority of black Americans were still living in the states of
the former Confederacy, and they remained second-class citizens,
or worse, in practice and law. Negro men were drafted and placed
in segregated military units even as America prepared to fight a fascist
regime that had as a core belief the inherent superiority of the
Aryan people.

It had been a turbulent twenty years for our young American, and
the worst and the best were yet to come. On December 7, 1941, the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Across America on that Sunday afternoon,
the stunning news from the radio electrified the nation and
changed the lives of all who heard it. Marriages were postponed or
accelerated. College was deferred. Plans of any kind for the future
were calibrated against the quickening pace of the march to war.

Shortly after the attack, Winston Churchill called FDR from the
prime minister's country estate, Chequers. In his book The Grand
Alliance, Churchill recounted the conversation. "Mr. President,
what's this about Japan?" Roosevelt replied, "It's quite true. They
have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We're all in the same boat now."

Churchill couldn't have been happier. He would now have the
manpower, the resources, and the political will of the United
States actively engaged in this fight for survival. He wrote, "So we
had won after all." A few days later, after Germany and Italy had
declared war against the United States, Churchill wrote to Anthony
Eden, his foreign secretary, who was traveling to Russia,
"The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and
with time and patience will give us certain victory."

In America, young men were enlisting in the military by the hundreds
of thousands. Farm kids from the Great Plains who never expected
to see the ocean in their lifetimes signed up for the Navy;
brothers followed brothers into the Marines; young daredevils who
were fascinated by the new frontiers of flight volunteered for pilot
training. Single young women poured into Washington to fill the
exploding needs for clerical help as the political capital mobilized
for war. Other women, their husbands or boyfriends off to basic
training, learned to drive trucks or handle welding torches. The old
rules of gender and expectation changed radically with what was
now expected of this generation.

My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the
backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for
the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition
depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of
far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.

It was a monochromatic world, the bleak brown prairie, Army-green
cars and trucks, khaki uniforms everywhere. My first impressions
of women were not confined to those of my mother
caring for my brothers and me at home. I can still see in my mind's
eye a woman in overalls carrying a lunch bucket, her hair covered
in a red bandanna, swinging out of the big Army truck she had just
parked, headed for home at the end of a long day. Women in what
had been men's jobs were part of the new workaday world of a nation
at war.

Looking back, I can recall that the grown-ups all seemed to have
a sense of purpose that was evident even to someone as young as
four, five, or six. Whatever else was happening in our family or
neighborhood, there was something greater connecting all of us, in
large ways and small.

Indeed there was, and the scope of the national involvement was
reflected in the numbers: by 1944, twelve million Americans were
in uniform; war production represented 44 percent of the Gross
National Product; there were almost nineteen million more workers
than there had been five years earlier, and 35 percent of them
were women. The nation was immersed in the war effort at every
level.

The young Americans of this time constituted a generation birth-marked
for greatness, a generation of Americans that would take its
place in American history with the generations that had converted
the North American wilderness into the United States and infused
the new nation with self-determination embodied first in the Declaration
of Independence and then in the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights.

At the end of the twentieth century the contributions of this
generation would be in bold print in any review of this turbulent
and earth-altering time. It may be historically premature to judge
the greatness of a whole generation, but indisputably, there are
common traits that cannot be denied. It is a generation that, by
and large, made no demands of homage from those who followed
and prospered economically, politically, and culturally because of
its sacrifices. It is a generation of towering achievement and modest
demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants
in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order. They
know how many of the best of their generation didn't make it to
their early twenties, how many brilliant scientists, teachers, spiritual
and business leaders, politicians and artists were lost in the
ravages of the greatest war the world has seen.

The enduring contributions of this generation transcend gender.
The world we know today was shaped not just on the front lines of
combat. From the Great Depression forward, through the war and
into the years of rebuilding and unparalleled progress on almost
every front, women were essential to and leaders in the greatest national
mobilization of resources and spirit the country had ever
known. They were also distinctive in that they raised the place of
their gender to new heights; they changed forever the perception
and the reality of women in all the disciplines of American life.

Millions of men and women were involved in this tumultuous
journey through adversity and achievement, despair and triumph.
Certainly there were those who failed to measure up, but taken as
a whole this generation did have a "rendezvous with destiny" that
went well beyond the outsized expectations of President Roosevelt
when he first issued that call to duty in 1936.

The stories that follow represent the lives of some of them. Each
is distinctive and yet reflective of the common experiences of that
trying time and this generation of greatness.